


Voulez-Vous

by Anemoi



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: M/M, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-14
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-07-12 08:50:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15991808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/pseuds/Anemoi
Summary: In hindsight he shouldn't have opened the package in the first place.





	Voulez-Vous

**Author's Note:**

> three years but when i heard abba on the radio i was forced to write this (incredibly contrived) fic. apologies for my lack of understanding what actually constitutes sex pollen fic

  
  


In hindsight he shouldn't have opened the package in the first place. It was stupid verging on idiocy, and he’d relied too much on being able to spot hate mail from a mile away- after all he’d had way too much practice at this through the years. The package in question arrived on Monday, right after the match, so instead of tossing it into the bin on his way in he’d just left it on the kitchen table instead, absently.

 

In the morning he’d glanced at it, remembered vaguely what happened, then headed off to training. When he came from training, legs aching and mind blurry, he’d opened it, not really thinking till the powder spilled out and puffed up in a white cloud.

 

Gary inhales in surprise before he could think too much about it. He coughs, still startled, unable to breathe for a second, then dunked his head under the tap and rinsed off as much as he could.

 

He’d had quite a few mail scares through the years. Nothing that was like this though. As soon as he could get his fingers to stop shaking so hard and when he was sure he’d rinsed off everything on him, and put the small package in a bag, he calls Paul.

 

“What?” Paul says, sharp. “Why are you calling _me_ first? Did you call the manager? The police? What about an ambulance?”

 

“I don’t know,” Gary says faintly, “I don’t really feel anything. What if it was just, flour or something.”

 

“I’m calling the ambulance,” Paul says with finality and hangs up. A minute later he calls back and asks, “What else was in there?”

 

“I’ve no idea,” Gary says, heart pounding. “I just put it away.”   


“It’ll be alright,” Paul says quickly. “Gary. Gaz.”

 

“Right,” Gary says, clenching the phone so hard his fingers hurt.

  
  


-

  


They come to get him decked out in full hazmat suits. Apparently there’s been a bit of an anthrax scare, although Gary thought that shouldn’t be powder. Or was it? He had no fucking clue, really, and all that mattered, somehow, was that he might not be able to play in the coming match.

 

He went through the decontamination room, stripped off everything and dumped it in clear plastic bags, then stepped into the shower cube with his eyes screwed shut as the jets of scalding hot water pummeled him all over.

 

In the end he gets dressed in soft pyjamas, like the kind, Gary thinks vaguely, that they give to people in psychiatric wards. He gets settled in a plain room with just a stainless steel bench on one side of the wall, and a large transparent glass window opposite. There’s another chamber before it, like some sort of interrogation room, the lights dim. Before he could take a seat, the door in the other room opens, and the boss walks in with Phil beside him.

 

Gary steps up to the glass and almost reaches out with a hand, pressed up against the glass like a thousand maudlin movie scenes. Phil doesn’t have qualms, pressing both hands flat up against the window. His mouth opens- he’s shouting but Gary can’t hear a thing, gesturing at the boss to do something, and Gary’s fists clench involuntarily by his side.

 

The boss puts a hand on Phil’s shoulder and bends his head, speaking into Phil’s ear. Phil looks anguished, and Gary - Gary just feels a wave of anger so strong it almost made him blackout, that he was stuck on this side with no information, that he’d opened the bloody package in the first place, that someone out there had it in for him so much they’d do this to him.

 

The boss had stopped speaking. He rummages around in his coat pocket and produces a notebook, writes something in pencil and tears off the sheet. He puts it flat against the glass so Gary can read it, and then crumples it up in a fist.  

 

Phil looks at Gary one last time before the policemen comes back in to usher them out. Gary nods at him, and Phil nods back, mouth set.

 

Gary goes back to the hard cold bench and sits down, trying to regulate his breathing like when he’s been winded in a game. In, out. In, out. Tries to focus on the boss’ words.

 

_WE’RE GETTING YOU OUT OF HERE. STAY STRONG GARY._

  


_-_

  


He’s not sure when he feels it. The room was cold, he remembers, when he’d first come in. The bench had been freezing under him and the thin pyjamas they gave him hadn’t been enough to stop goosebumps breaking on his arms. But after awhile it seemed like they turned on the heating or something, and the air becomes almost stifling.

 

He rolls up the sleeves of his shirt at first. It felt like heat flashes, a pulsing sort of headache starting at the back of his head. It gets worse, and he starts sweating like he’s been running a full ninety minutes up and down the pitch.

 

He takes off his shirt and that’s when it gets worse. All of a sudden he couldn’t breathe, just like when he’d first inhaled the powder, and he claws at his throat, stumbling around the room and banging on the glass. There wasn’t even a panic button or anything, he thinks wildly, he was really about to die of anthrax poisoning in a bloody sterile room with no one around him. He hadn’t even had his testimonial yet.

 

Just before he blacks out he sees figures rush into the room opposite the window, and just before he hits the floor he thinks someone comes in, calling his name.

  


-

  
  
  


He wakes up in a hospital bed with an IV in his arm.  

 

“Gary,” Paul says, relaxing a hand that was clamped to Gary’s wrist. Phil’s hovering anxiously on the other side of Gary’s bed.

 

“How long was I out,” Gary says, taking a sip from the glass Paul hands him.

 

“An hour?” Phil says, “me and the boss went to talk to the police and them but we heard you collapsed half an hour after we left. I came back right away. The boss will be here soon.”

 

“Becks is blowing up your phone mate,” Ryan says from the foot of Gary’s bed, Gary’s phone in his hand. He tosses it to Gary.

 

“You replied?” Gary says, looking at his texts.

 

“Yeah,” Ryan says. “Do you feel any better?”

 

“I feel fine,” Gary says slowly, sitting up. “I don’t even remember what happened before I got here.”

 

“You were burning up,” Paul says. “They were going to keep you there and run some more tests but I think the lab results came through in time, so they moved you here. The manager would have something to do with that.”

 

“Yeah,” Gary says. The boss walked in, just then, as though saying his name evoked him, magically. Paul looks briefly amused, and Gary cracks a small grin at this. It felt comforting, to have them all here with him, even though everything else remained uncertain.

  


“I have to speak to Gary alone,” the boss says. Everyone files out obediently at this, Paul leaving with a final comforting squeeze to Gary’s hand.

 

The boss takes Paul’s vacated chair. He looks grim, Gary thinks, sudden heart constricting. It must be something bad, even if they’re letting him out here in public and interacting with everyone else so it shouldn’t have been contagious-

 

“Gary,” the boss says. “It’s not as bad as what we thought. It’s not Anthrax, or any other typical poison really. I think they figured it out in the lab from the note we found inside the package that you opened.”

 

“There was a note?” Gary asks, voice rasping. “What did it say?”

 

The boss was silent for a long time before replying, as though he was weighing up his options. Finally he says, drawing out his words as though to be absolutely clear Gary understood him, “It said, go fuck a scouser.”

 

“What?” Gary says. He thinks maybe he’s about to pass out again, or something, or maybe whatever he’d ingested was only now starting to affect his vital systems. Surely it’s a hallucination, the boss sitting there looking absolutely serious, telling Gary to _go fuck a scouser._ He waits for the boss to repeat himself, or clarify, or say that the whole thing was some kind of massive joke that was supposed to soften the blow of him being dropped from the first team, anything that wasn’t what the blunt words meant.

 

He didn’t do any of that. He just told Gary that it wasn’t a rare occurrence, that people got this stuff from the dark web quite easily for a few hundred quid, and they were going to up the security to Gary’s house from now on. But it did have precedents- the doctors were quite clear about that. There were instances of what had happened if the stipulations weren’t followed, and it wasn’t pretty. Passing out would just be the tip of an iceberg, if Gary doesn’t follow the threat.

 

He stops after the explanation, and waits for Gary to collect himself. Gary doesn’t know what to say- there didn’t seem anything left to say.

 

“What do you want to do, Gary?” The boss says, almost gently.   
  
He thinks about it. “I want to go home.”

  


The boss drives him home personally, waving off the other three hovering anxiously beside the door with a few words of explanation.   
  
“Anything I can do?” He says at last, Gary settled in on his own sofa.

Gary felt nonplussed. He thinks about it. “How long do I have?”

“Not more than twelve hours, I think. There might be- side effects- before then.”

“Right.”   
  
The boss waits, but Gary doesn’t know what else to say to this, and he finally turns to leave.

He stops at the door again, not looking at Gary. “Gary,” he says. “Please. Call someone. No one else knows- I didn’t think you’d want them to. But please.”

Gary makes himself nod, and when he hears the front door close he finally lets himself sink back into the cushions and dig the heels of his hands against his eyes.

  


-

  
  


Stupid. He was bloody stupid. How many scousers does he even know? He runs through the ones in the England team. Stevie was the obvious choice- they talk the most during international breaks, and he likes Stevie well enough when he wasn’t captaining Liverpool. _Liverpool. Fuck._ He wonders, wildly, if Wazza still counts as Scouse, then winces because its _Wazza._

The note hadn’t been that clear defined. Gary wants to laugh, really, half out of relief and half out of fear. Relief it wasn’t really poison, fear that he was going to mess it up, fuck someone as some sort of last ditch redemption act and then have it not work.   


He stops scrolling when he gets to Carragher’s name. They’d talked briefly during international duty. He’d been miserly in Liverpool games, a furious, wound up sort of figure stalking the back lines and tackling inelegantly with brutal efficiency. Gary had been surprised, during their interactions in the England team, to learn that he had another side.

 

He’d been surprisingly funny, if only on the one occasion when Gary could understand what he was saying. He’d have a great memory for all the England games and the important matches, down to who scored what goal. They’d all sat down and tested Carragher, and he’d gotten almost every question right, grinning with confidence.

 

Gary had thought, then, maybe if Carragher hadn’t been the wrong shade of red, that they might have been better friends.

 

It’s more that than anything else that makes him dial Carragher’s number.

  
  
  


-

 

“You what?” Carragher shouts into the phone. Gary had instantly regretted it when Carragher had answered the phone with a curt _Neville?_ They don’t talk to each other during the season, he remembers, jarringly. He hadn’t even thought about that and now it was too late. If he couldn’t convince Carragher he doesn’t think he had it in him to try again, even if his life was at stake. Maybe he should have just stuck with Wazza and seen it through.

 

“Did you hear anything I said?” Gary says.

 

“I did. I just didn’t think you were being serious. It’s not a joke or something, is it?” Carragher says, incoherently. Gary was so tired and fed up he almost wants to start laughing, but he swallows back the giggles in case Carragher would take it as ultimate proof of some prank.

 

“It’s not,” he says instead. And then, “I won’t beg. But I’m asking.”

 

Carragher makes a sound of protest, then stays quiet for a while, just breathing on the line. Gary screws up his eyes tight till he can see stars, waiting, his heart thumping blood loud into his ears.

 

“Alright then,” Carragher says abruptly. “I’ll drive up now. Give me an hour.”

He hangs up before Gary can say anything else, and leaves Gary staring at his phone, hardly believing what had happened.

  
  
  


 

-

 

It starts twenty minutes after he puts down the phone. At first it was just being too warm- Gary turns down the thermostat and sits on the sofa, tugging at his collar and then taking off his shirt entirely. He resists the urge to text Carragher again, switching from channel to channel on the television. There’s a replay of the last match on and he focuses on that, fists clenched in his lap.   


He barely hears the front door open, and was glad he had the presence of mind to leave it unlocked earlier. It was taking every effort he had to keep himself in place. He hears Carragher call out, “Gary?” and croaks out an answer.

 

“It’s fucking freezing in here,” Carragher says, walking into the living room shivering. “Why isn’t the heat on?”

Gary’s sitting in his training shorts, shirt off and sweating. He’s drank about a gallon of water but his lips still felt too dry, chapped and bitten through. Carragher takes a look at him and swears, dropping his coat on the floor on his way to Gary.

 

“Neville,” he says, both hands wrapped around Gary’s arms. “Look at me.”

 

Gary does. Carragher physically recoils, like Gary had burned him or something, even though all Gary did was meet his eyes.

“Shit,” Carragher says softly. He lets go of Gary’s arms and puts a hand to Gary’s forehead, pushes back his slicked down hair. Gary leans into his touch, almost against his will. He has to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering.

“ _Shit_ ,” Carragher says again, “Are you sure you’re not supposed to be in a hospital right now, Neville? I’m not a fucking - doctor- or whatever, and you-”

“Carra,” Gary says. He can’t take his eyes off Carragher’s mouth. It feels like every word was an effort paramount to climbing a mountain with a shredded hamstring at this point. “I told you when I called you. I don’t need. A Doctor.”

Carragher looks at him, a beat more, his gaze still unsure. Then he leans in and, almost gently, warily presses his mouth to Gary’s.

Gary opens his mouth, automatic. It felt like he was having an out of body experience, every nerve ending in his body on fire. Carragher pulls back, surprised, and Gary almost relishes his expression at the little experiment gone wrong. He couldn’t really afford Carragher testing the waters, not right now.

 

“I think we should go upstairs,” Carragher says carefully.

 

Gary doesn’t say a word, just walks out of the room, Carragher following him in silence.

  


They get to Gary’s bedroom and it’s like all the practice in the living room was undone- Gary sits on the bed and Carragher’s hovering by the door, looking unsure and vaguely sick.

“You. Not having second thoughts? Are you,” Gary says. He doesn’t want to let go but he feels like he was close- just one paper thin veneer over the threat of absolute loss of control. He thinks back to Carragher’s warm firm hands bracketing each side of his face and closes his eyes for a second.

 

Carragher shakes his head. He’s still not moving from his spot by the doorway. Gary gets up, unsteady, and deliberately walks over to Carragher. He waits for a second, then pushes Carragher back into the door, too hard, Carragher’s head hitting the wood with a solid smack that would’ve made Gary wince if he wasn’t almost out of his mind.

 

Carragher pushes him back, almost automatically, and Gary staggers. Before he could fall Carragher grabs him and presses him against the wall, and Gary hisses through his teeth, Carragher’s mouth meeting him in a messy clash of teeth and tongue.

 

He reaches for Carragher’s belt with his eyes closed, and Carragher shifts to let him. Gary’s so hard already it almost hurts, and before he knows it his knees hit the floor with a solid sound.

 

“Gary- fuck-,” Carragher says, tugging at his wrists. Gary couldn’t focus on anything except on Carragher’s cock, pressed uncomfortably against the front of his jeans.

 

“You could,” Gary croaks, inanely, “Shut up any time now.”

 

“What?”

 

Gary tugs down Carragher’s jeans and Carragher moans- Gary leans forward, slides Carragher’s cock into his mouth with his eyes closed, swallowing a little by reflex.

 

“ _Fuck,_ Gary,” Carragher says, “Just- hang in there for a minute. I’ve got.”

 

Gary looks at him, and Carragher rummages around in his back pocket before holding out lube packets, fanned out like a hand of cards. He looked ridiculous, cock out and all, cheeks flushed. Somehow he manages a weak grin at Gary and through the haze, the faintly sick feeling Gary’s still getting from the powder and the way his limbs outran his brain in eagerness sometimes, he feels a sense of relief. Like maybe, they’d make it out of this intact somehow.

  


Carragher takes the rest of his clothes off and gestures at the bed, ducking his head a little, shoulders hunched. It can’t be easy, Gary thinks woozily, stepping out of his shorts and crawling onto the bed. Carragher reaches around the side of the dresser and flicks the light off.

 

“Reckon this would be easier with no lights on,” Carragher whispers, pushing a finger into Gary. He’s right and wrong- ostensibly now they didn’t have to stare at each other while they fucked, but there’s no way to get around it, really, the dark in the bedroom weakly illuminated by street lights outside, Carragher’s head buried in the crook of Gary’s shoulder and Gary’s breathes coming out in ragged gasps.

“You should sit,” Carragher says, rolling over to his side. “I don’t- you can control it better or something-”

“Right,” Gary says, and sits there for a second, uncertain. He straddles Carragher and expects him to make another joke or something to keep it from getting awkward, they were both doing so well up until now, but Carragher keeps quiet when Gary takes hold of his dick. It’s so quiet he thinks he can hear Carragher swallow, and Gary reaches out and feels around until he finds Carragher’s hand and interlaces their fingers together.

 

He slides onto Carragher’s cock, and Carragher makes a sound- like a bitten off moan, tearing his hand from Gary’s and settling too hard around Gary’s hips. It feels like a fuse lighting somewhere in his brain, struggling to find the right position to move until they both find a rhythm that’s sustainable.

  


The rest of it is over too fast- too much, too fast, and Gary’s coming, biting the inside of his own mouth so he won’t make a sound, Carragher’s hands holding him tight and not letting go.

  
  
  
  
  


-

 

“Did you-” Gary says, post shower. Carragher’s wrapped in Gary’s towel, stretched out on the bed like he’s been there since time immemorial. He’s recovered enough, fresh faced from his shower and cheerful, to smirk at Gary.

“Yeah! I did. Not surprised you didn’t notice. Looked a bit preoccupied yourself.”

Gary flicks him with his towel. It should feel weird but it somehow didn’t.

 

“Are you good now,” Carragher says, more seriously. Gary flicks wet hair out of his eyes and shrugs.

“I feel normal now. Probably have to go back to hospital to confirm anyway. And tell the boss.”

Carragher’s face was a picture of horror. “You have to tell Fer-”

Gary couldn’t help it, he laughs.

“You won’t kick me out will you,” Carragher says, already pulling the sheets up around himself and looking at Gary with round eyes. “It’s a long drive back to Liverpool, what with traffic and all.”   


“You can stay,” Gary says. He doesn’t even add, _f_ _or now,_ and falls asleep to Carra’s deep even breathing.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! <3


End file.
